I jumped into George RR Martin's song of ice and fire series after having it recommended to me on these boards. I'm almost through with the second book and it's fantastic. I hope HBO adapts it and treats it better than they've treated pretty much every other show aside from the Sopranos.

Anyway, I want to know if anyone can recommend some good, hard sci-fi books. I just watched Primer a little while ago and have a taste for a good story full of tech-jargon. Thanks.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield. Sort of a hard sci-fi version of "The Fountain". A guy refuses to accept his wife's death and spends, well, the rest of time trying to reunite with her. There's a kernal of romanticism wrapped gobs and gobs of hard-core science (life-extension tech, digital consciousness, end-time theory) fun. A bit haunting too.

David Weber's Honor Harrington series perhaps? Enormous, plodding space navies(with the good guys belonging to a faux-British Royal Navy) duking it out in an interstellar war, though its as much about the characters as it is the sci-fi. First one's available for free online here, so you don't even need to spend a dime on it to know what you're getting into.

I also hear good things about Ian M. Banks' Culture cycle, but am not familiar enough with the material to gauge it's hard sci-fi quality.

They are good. Seriously, awesomely good. Really worth reading. But I don't know if it's hard either. Maybe a definition of what the original poster means by hard science fiction. I recommend Excession. Although maybe The Algebraist is more in line with what people consider hard science fiction.

How hard or soft sci fi is depends on how rigorously the rules are adhered to.

There are other basic ideas moving around, but generally that's how I define it.

No FTL {within reason}, realistic orbital mechanics, that kind of stuff. The New Space Opera movement coming out of Britain is pretty hard, whereas early Space Opera {Star Wars} is very soft, so that's a good within subgenre look at the idea.

Older hard stuff generally didn't have great character development since the focus was really on the science. Larry Niven made an early part of his career just writing about the weird locales you can have in space.

The Coldest Place, for instance, written before we knew Mercury rotated, was about the coldest place in the solar system, the dark side of Mercury. Cool idea, not a lot of great character work.

{and don't jump my ass about that generalization, Niven is one of my favorite authors too}

Asimov would be, I would say, more soft in general. Whilst his books feature advanced tech, they are mostly, Foundation series in particular, looking at the society involved, with machinery barely featuring, only as means to an end. The Foundation books are, though, lovely.

I, Robot could be classed as hard sf, as it's dealing with a history of robots, albeit through tales of the men and women who worked on them.